What's with Paso Robles Cabernet?

Wines & Vines, August, 1993 by Richard Paul Hinkle

We are sitting around a long table, a dozen local vintners and I, doggedly tasting our way through nearly four dozen Paso Cabs. It is a combination house-warming and bull session: Gary and Jeanie Eberle have just moved into their new, Southwestern hacienda-styled home and we are trying to get a handle on just where Paso Robles Cabernets Sauvignon fit into the grand scheme of things.

They fit very nicely, you may have noticed. They fit because they are reachable. Accessible. User-friendly, to borrow from the hacker's lexicon. Better still, just plain, downright, unabashedly friendly. As former winemaker Jim Carter (then of Sebastiani, now a broker with Joseph W. Ciatti Wine Co.) guilelessly described a similar wine to me two decades ago, when we were both rookies in the field: "It's a friendly wine. It'll let you talk, too!"

"Our Cabernets show off their fruit," says Robert Nadeau, the winemaker at one of Paso's several fledgling wine operations, Mission View, where the wines are ripe and round, with chocolate and green bean. "They're all pretty forward in their fruitiness, they really showcase Cabernet's varietal character. It's so nice that most of us don't use a lot of oak, or at least a lot of new oak. You don't want to mask that lovely fruit. You want the oak as a layer of flavor, but you don't want it to dominate the wine."

Nick Martin--a former Sonoma County winemaker (Lambert Bridge) more known for his Italian leanings with Nebbiolo, Vin Santo, Aleatico, Moscato, Grappa di Nebbiolo and Primativo (Zinfandel, remember?)--has been producing Cabernet Sauvignon since 1987. "The thing about Cabernet here in Paso Robles is that its tannins are so easy to take, they're very soft, and the fruit is so plummy and so easily available. We're also making a Cabernet--we call it Cabernet Etrusco--that employs 15% of Sangiovese for even more liveliness. It's a little something different."

Folks in the northern half of San Luis Obispo County seem to require points of departure just to get their tale told to a wider audience. The southern edge of the town of Paso Robles is exactly equidistant from San Francisco and Los Angeles, so the availability of major media ranges somewhere between little and nil.

Nor does it help that the region's winegrowing history is sparse indeed until its rebirth in the early 1970s. But there are some hoary stories of yore. The York saga is the county's oldest continuous vinicultural story, dating from Andrew York driving a team of oxen from his native Indiana, purchasing the Grandstaff Ranch (now called York Mountain), south of Paso Robles, in 1882. (Grandstaff had been deeded the land seven years earlier by President Ulysses S. Grant.)

Employing the reliable labor of three sons, Andrew York built a small winery to process surplus grapes, later expanding it with bricks formed from clay found on his land. Two of his sons, Walter and Silas, made wine as York Brothers Winery after Andrew's death in 1913. The largest winery in the county, it was run by Walter's son Wilfrid after the brothers retired in 1944. In 1970 Wilfrid sold to veteran wineman Max Goldman, whose son Steve produces Cabernets dense with bell pepper and peppermint.

One must also take note of the county's most famous viniculturist, the polished pianist and Polish patriot Ignace Paderewski, who bought 2,000 acres of upland north and west of Paso in 1913. He planted Thin Shell, Princess and Jordan almonds . . . and a little Zinfandel and Petite Sirah as appropriate accompaniment.

The rebirth of viniculture at Paso Robles was fueled by a pair of quite different operations, one representing Paso West, the other Paso East. The former is Hoffman Mountain Ranch, where grapes were first planted adjacent to the almonds of Paderewski's property in 1965 by cardiologist Stanley Hoffman. The first wines were made in 1972, but the second vintage brought as consulting enologist winedom's living treasure, the Russian leprechaun Andre Tchelistcheff, who called the area "a jewel of ecological elements."

The latter was Estrella River, whose plantings were initiated in 1972 by Penn State footballer Gary Eberle, just out of medical school at LSU. The husky, bearded Eberle supervised an aggressive planting program that focused on Cabernet Sauvignon (200 of the 700 acres) and had one of the early plantings of the French Syrah. (Estrella later went through upheavals business and personal, with Eberle leaving to found his own winery and Estrella snapped up by Beringer's Wine World. Brilliant consulting enologist Chuck Ortman, and his brand Meridian, were convinced to leave the Napa Valley for the wilds of semi-arid Paso East.)

To talk of Paso Cabs, one must eventually make the distinction between those grown east of Highway 101, where the climate is notably warmer and markedly drier, and those grown to the west, where increasing marine influence makes ripening the Cabernet a marginal process.

"The climate is quite different, and so are the wines," says York Mountain's Steve Goldman. "Wines grown out here on the bench (Paso East) are softer, more gentle wines. Ours, on the other hand, are harder wines, a bit more coarse at first, with much darker color: black-and-blue wines, if you will. The pHs are noticeably lower, the acids higher. Eastside Cabernets can be enjoyed pretty much as soon as they're bottled; ours take years to come around."